1 Title: Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg
2 Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
5 <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
6 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
7 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
8 Sweden. This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March this
9 year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how to
10 adjust and scale the setup to his liking. He granted me an interview,
11 and I am happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
13 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
15 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
16 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
17 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
18 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups. In
19 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
20 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
21 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
22 perspective when working with IT.</p>
24 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
27 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
28 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
29 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
30 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
31 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
32 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
34 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
37 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
38 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, windows
39 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
40 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
41 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
42 well. But that is VNC-based and LTSP, to me, is better when it comes
43 to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is showing videos from
44 Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to mix thinclients with
45 workstations, since the user settings will be the same. In our
46 VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by setting up a
47 second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the workstations,
48 because they will be different from the ones used on the
49 thinclients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
50 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
51 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
52 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
53 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
54 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time. Our
55 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
56 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
57 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
58 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
61 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
64 <p>Debian is a bit to quick when it comes to updating. As an example
65 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
66 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
67 sound from working with them. It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
68 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
69 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
71 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
72 install time. In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
73 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba
74 integration. That is more a cosmetic /translation issue, and not a
75 real problem. Running windows applications within the Skolelinux
76 environment needs to be better supported. That is, running them
77 seamlessly via RDP, and support for single-sign on. That will make
78 the transition to free software easier, because you can keep the
79 applications you really need. No support will make it impossible if
80 you work in a school were some applications cant be open source. As
81 for us we really need to run InDesign in our journalist classes.</p>
84 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
86 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days. I use almost
87 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
88 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
91 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
92 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
94 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
95 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
96 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
97 flawlessly. Problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever will
98 create problems when it comes to both teachers and students. Economy
99 are also important for schools, so using thinclients,as long as they
100 have good multimedia support, are a very good idea. It's also
101 important that the open source software works even for the
102 administration. It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with open
103 source, if the principal has to run Windows. It also creates a problem
104 if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that will
105 create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good support for
106 running windows applications via the thin client (Linux) desktop is
107 essential. At least at our school, where we have mixed level of
108 educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
111 > Is this Adobe InDesign? What is it doing that the free software
112 > alternatives can not offer?
114 We run a journalist education. One of the very few non university
115 ones that is ok:d by Svenska journalistförbundet, and that gives the
116 pupils the right of membership there, once they are done. (Important
117 if you want to get a job.)
119 InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
120 magazines. We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
121 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
122 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
123 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
124 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
125 edit and compile a newspaper. But politically at our school we are not
126 there yet. And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.
128 We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to the
129 radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
130 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
131 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more openminded. We have
132 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
133 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
134 studio. Its way to complex and the gui is to scattered when you only
135 want to cut, make passovers, add extra channels and normalize. Thoose
136 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
137 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
138 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
139 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequentlly
140 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
143 So, I am not sure we will succed in replacing even Audition, but we
144 will try. Problem is the students have certain expectations when they
145 start an education towards a profession. So the programs has to look
146 and feel professional. Good thing with radio, there are many programs
147 out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised as
148 Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what program
149 they learn, because once they start working they still have to learn
150 the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn the
151 editing part without to much focus on a specific software.